I have a Dell Inspiron n5110 machine running Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. It has 6 GB of RAM and 500 GB hard disk capable to run any Windows or Linux system.

And I recently attempted to install Windows 8 in the machine. Installation goes fine and smooth until the final stage when Windows is done installing and gets devices ready. when getting devices ready reaches about 60%, the screen goes blank with the machine running. after a while it reboots. and after the new Windows logo with dotted circles are done showing up, the screen goes blank again (when we'd expect login screen to show up). there is not even a cursor. I can see the hard disk activity led blinking but nothing shows up in the screen.

I've tried clean install several times. The dvd is fine, it installed and worked well in my friends' laptop pcs. I tried installing both pro version and enterprise version and both 32-bit and 64-bit. but the problem was same every time. Finally, I had to re install Windows 7 which installed and ran without any problem.

the problem, we can guess, is graphics perhaps. I have Intel Sandybridge graphics mobile chipset (Intel HD graphics 3000). but if Windows 7 and Linux distributions like mint and backtrack can run on the machine, why on earth, would Windows 8 not run?